Photography Gallery
Silas Scarborough
This site is comprised of a number of different galleries. In some cases, such as the Orchid Conservatory or the Green Animals Topiary Garden, it was easy to segregate the images but others are segregated simply by the photographic technique used to produce them.
Introduction
Digital Photography
All digital pictures were shot with a Canon S45 digital camera. The most current model is an S60 as of this writing but check the Canon site for more information. And definitely do not pay the list price. Shop around before you buy!
Using 256 MB of memory, I've shot up to 160 images in a session and only stopped because the battery ran down. The same camera is used for underwater photography and the Canon WP-DC300 waterproof case worked flawlessly. The auto-focus has some difficulty underwater but this may have been due to dust stirred up by the waves. I'll experiment further with this and report on the results.
Traditional Photography
All traditional photographs were shot with a Minolta Maxxum 7000i camera, some with a Sigma 28mm wide-angle and others with a Sigma 80mm-200mm zoom. The macro feature of the Sigma zoom lens was frequently used for flower photography. Other than a haze filter, there was no modification to any photograph at the time that it was exposed.
Digital vs Traditional
Given that the resolution of higher-end digital cameras is now as good or better than film, I don't see any particular reason to go back to traditional photography. Many manufacturers are building digital cameras that support standard lenses so the distinction between digital and traditional cameras is rapidly disappearing.
The Canon EOS digital cameras, among others, support standard lenses and have resolution higher than can be achieved with standard 35 mm film. They are fairly expensive cameras but really not much more than quality SLR cameras in their day. One by one, the traditional camera manufacturers are shifting to digital and it won't be too much longer before the SLR will be the rarity.
If you're looking for an in-depth comparison of traditional and digital techniques, check out any photography magazine. I prefer digital because the quality is excellent and I don't have time to screw around with film. Beyond that, the differences are largely intellectual and I don't have time for philosophy either.
Everything on these pages has been developed on Apple computers. I've used Apple and Windows systems extensively for over twenty years and the latter systems have been grossly unreliable. The implementation of Apple's OS X system has made navigation vastly easier than it was on previous Apple systems and even those were light years ahead of Windows.
Managing Images
I use the following approach to gathering images: I pack an Apple iBook for traveling. It serves as the storage medium for photographs. After spending a day with the Canon S45, the camera is connected via USB to the iBook and the images are loaded into the computer. I'll do a preliminary screen with iPhoto as it provides a display that is quite similar to a traditional contact sheet in which it is fairly painless to review the day's photographs and delete the ones that didn't work. In this way, I know immediately if there are any photographs that I might want to try again and I also have storage capacity that is only limited by the hard drive in the iBook.
On returning home, I connect the iBook into my home network to which my G4 is also connected. The network is based on a Linksys cable router and it also gives shared access to an HP laser printer and an Epson color inkjet printer. After the iBook is connected, all of the images collected during the trip are loaded onto the G4. When I'm satisfied that the transfer has been successful, I delete the images from the iBook and it's ready to travel again.
Processing Images
My Apple G4 has dual processors, well over a terabyte of disk storage, and an Apple 23" Cinema display. Even though it is now obsolete, it is still an impressive performer. In any case, after loading the images to the G4, I'll load them into Adobe Photoshop for whatever processing I might need. (Note: You could get a used G4 for peanuts and it has easily enough power for general Photoshop processing)
The post-processing step can go in multiple directions. If my intention is to publish to the Web, the image will be modified as necessary and then reduced to a size suitable for a Web page (e.g., 640x480 or 800x600). If my intention is to print the image then I'll keep it at the highest resolution possible such that it can be used for a digital print or the digital source file can be sent to a photo shop to be used to create a traditional negative for subsequent printing.
Modification of a digital image can be a sensitive subject to photographers but my interest is only in what the final image can be made to be. Sometimes the image requires no modification at all while at others the source image is simply the starting point toward something that may be much better.
Photoshop provides many tools for working with the traditional aspects of photography such as exposure, color filtering, etc., and it is extremely powerful in this regard. It also provides the ability to customize the image in various ways but there are much more radical ways to do it and these are achieved through third-party products such as Corel's KPT and Alien Skin's Eye Candy filtering software.
I am not particularly impressed with KPT since Corel acquired the product. It had some incredible powers in previous releases and but it's more flash and bluster than anything else these days. Eye Candy is not as radical as KPT but it provides some useful features such as drop shadows, etc. Xaos Paint Alchemy provided some really pretty painterly effects but the product has not been upgraded for years. The Xaos Web site still exists but it's unclear what purpose it serves.
Software Tips
A tip for Web artists: Photoshop has a "Save for Web" function that will greatly reduce the physical size of an image file without a significant compromise to quality. Photoshop is expensive so also consider Graphic Converter as it is professional quality and any Mac user with even a passing interest in digital image processing should have a copy. The license fee is astonishingly low.
